Shopify's Harley Finkelstein: Universal Commerce Protocol with Google opens every AI agent to every merchant

Summary

Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify, used the NRF retail conference at the Javits Center in New York — attended by roughly 40,000 people — to announce four product moves, the most significant being a co-developed open-source protocol with Google called the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). The protocol creates a standardized language allowing every AI agent to connect to every Shopify merchant, enabling capabilities well beyond single-item transactions. Merchants can now communicate to agents instructions around loyalty programs, subscriptions, bundling, and logistics preferences — ensuring the agentic shopping experience matches the quality of a dedicated online store.

The second Google-linked announcement expands Shopify's agentic storefront reach beyond ChatGPT, which was the initial integration announced in Q3, to now include Gemini, AI Mode in Google Search, and Microsoft Copilot. The third and arguably most strategically aggressive move opens agentic commerce to brands not on Shopify at all. Through a new Agentic Plan, any brand can have its products syndicated and indexed across AI shopping surfaces without migrating to Shopify's core platform — a direct play to dominate product discovery infrastructure regardless of merchant loyalty.

On adoption velocity, Finkelstein cites a 14x increase in orders flowing to Shopify stores from some form of AI agent between January 2025 and January 2026. He is careful to note these are still small absolute numbers against a base of $90 billion processed last quarter, and that agent-initiated traffic does not necessarily mean the transaction completed within the agent itself. Still, the directional signal is significant enough that he maintains agentic commerce was underhyped as of last year's NRF.

Finkelstein frames the broader brand-building environment as unusually fertile, pointing to AG1's $600 million revenue from a single SKU and the rise of Gymshark and SKIMS — both roughly a decade old — as evidence that more billion-dollar brands will be created in the next ten years than in the past hundred. The pattern he identifies across breakout brands is TAM creation rather than market-share capture: Skims did not take share from Spanx so much as redefine the category entirely.

Agenttic commerce adoption, in his view, will follow an asymmetric curve — most consumers using it some of the time, a subset using it heavily — rather than a clean displacement of traditional e-commerce. The customer journey shift is expected to be gradual through 2026, with early adopters skewing toward the technically engaged before broadening into consumer categories.